By:James Lord Pierpont · Source Recording: Rhonda Vincent (2006)Song details
Dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh
O'er the fields we go laughing all the way
Bells on bob-tails ring making spirits bright
What fun it is to laugh and sing a sleighing song tonight Oh
Jingle bells jingle bells jingle all the way
Oh what fun it is to ride
In a one-horse open sleigh
Jingle bells jingle bells jingle all the way
Oh what fun it is to ride
In a one-horse open sleigh
A day or two ago I thought I'd take a ride
And soon Miss Fanny Bright was seated by my side
The horse was lean and lank misfortune seemed his lot
We ran into a drifted bank and there we got upsot Oh
A day or two ago the story I must tell
I went out on the snow and on my back I fell
A gent was riding by in a one-horse open sleigh
He laughed at me as I there lay but quickly drove away Oh
Now the ground is white go it while you're young
Take the girls along and sing this sleighing song
Just bet a bobtailed bay two forty as his speed
Hitch him to an open sleigh and crack you'll take the lead Oh
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By:James Lord Pierpont · Source Recording:Rhonda Vincent (2006)
James Lord Pierpont copyrighted the song on September 16, 1857, as “The One Horse Open Sleigh,” “song and chorus written and composed by J. Pierpont.” It belongs to the sleighing songs that were popular at the time — the researcher Kyna Hamill points out how closely its lines echo others of the kind — and it says nothing about Christmas; the holiday claimed it decades later. The words most people sing differ a little from the 1857 ones, and nobody knows who changed them, and the 1857 chorus had a busier tune than today’s, which goes back at least to the Edison Male Quartette’s “Sleigh Ride Party” medley of 1898, the earliest sung recording that survives. As the music historian James Fuld noted, “jingle” in the first line is apparently a verb, an order to the bells — New England horses wore them in winter so that silent sleighs would not collide. The verses tell a comic story: Miss Fanny Bright, a lean horse, a drift, and a spill in the snow.
The first bluegrass records of it were instrumentals, by Reno and Smiley in 1963 and the Country Gentlemen in 1965. Rhonda Vincent sang it on her Rounder Christmas album Beautiful Star (2006), with Bryan Sutton, Adam Steffey, Aaron McDaris and Hunter Berry in the band and a group of children joining in, and recorded it again in a new arrangement for Christmas Time in 2015. Dailey & Vincent put it on The Sounds of Christmas (2018), adding a spelled-out “J-I-N-G-L-E” hook of their own.
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Clicks before the band comes in, so you start together.
Raises the tempo as the band goes round, so you build up speed.
The band goes quiet for a bar or two and you keep the time going.
Clicks before the band comes in, so you start together.
Raises the tempo as the band goes round, so you build up speed.
The band goes quiet for a bar or two and you keep the time going.
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